Only a few years ago, Nazila Azizi was dodging bullets fired by the Taliban and trying to climb aboard one of the last evacuation flights out of Kabul. Today, the Afghan native is an architect and filmmaker, with a documentary in contention for Academy Award recognition.

LineOut, now on an Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles, explores the psychic space of refugees forced to abandon home. It begins with footage Azizi shot on her cell phone as she fled her birthplace, but this is not a straightforward account of leaving Afghanistan as the Taliban overwhelmed the capital. That sort of thing, Azizi says, “[you can see] on the news. You can see what’s going on in different countries.”

Instead, the director takes an abstract approach, venturing into magical realism.

“In magical realism, you make the impossible believable,” Azizi explained at special screening of LineOut in Beverly Hills last week. “You make it easy to believe.”

The filmmaker achieves that through poetic narration that anthropomorphizes home.

“Like your trembling shadows, like the echo of your footsteps, I am a whisper from within you,” the narration thrums. “You know me.”

“I started writing this as a therapy for myself. I started talking to home to see if I can find it,” Azizi said. “And then when I wrote it – she found me. I found her… To me, [home] was a [woman].”

To voice the words, Azizi turned to actress Anousha, who was born in Shiraz, Iran and has faced her own journey of displacement. Anousha said she didn’t want her voiceover to sound theatrical, but more intimate and personal.

“[Nazila] gave me the script and it’s so poetic,” she said at the Q&A. “I was like, ‘I’m going to focus on one person and I’m going to gift this script to this one person.’ And I kept thinking, ‘Who should be that person?’ …Maybe that’s my inner child. That’s the little Anousha that left Shiraz, then left Tehran, then left London, then San Francisco, then New York.’ …I was like, ‘If I can just give my focused love to my inner child, probably the voice of home is going to come out authentic, as authentic as possible.’”

The magical realism manifests in images of turbulent ocean waters, perhaps a gesture to the toll of migrants lost in the Mediterranean. This year alone, more than 50 Afghans have died while trying to cross that body of water to escape Taliban rule, according to reports. Home itself seems drowned, in the words of the film’s narrator.

“Deep beneath the waves I found myself confined,” the narrator says. “My thoughts constantly drift to my children above. Are they lost in sorrow? Or do they find brief moments of joy?”

The sense of loss pervades LineOut. In dream-like sequences, a small child is seen alone on a beach. With a stick, she carves the outline of a dwelling, but the surf effaces it.

“The little girl keeps drawing the house on the sand and it keeps being washed away with the water,” noted Anousha. “You’re forced to repeat this thing that you want from life and just have to be steady with it.”

A necessary part of healing is to experience grief, the film suggests. While fleeing Afghanistan with other refugees, Azizi said she observed, “Nobody had time to process the grief. You could see the anxiety, you could see the sadness somehow, but… it wasn’t the real acknowledgement of, ‘I missed home.’ … That’s all I’m trying to do, is to open a space for this whole new generation of Afghans coming here and those who have been evacuated, those who are being born [to] parents who are carrying this pain and transferring all this pain to the next generation… to open a space for grief to be acknowledged.”

Azizi referenced the 13th century poet Rumi, who was forced to flee home in what is now Afghanistan, ahead of advancing Mongols. “As Rumi said, ‘When sorrow is at the door, invite it in’. So. when the grief is already at the door, we have no other choice [but] to invite it in.”

Since settling in the U.S., Azizi has worked in film, architecture, and design, creating – among other things – urban installations and theater lighting design concepts.

“After coming here, academically and in terms of finding a career, I had so many good opportunities,” the filmmaker said. “I started living a life, but I was also crying. It took me maybe two years because I just began missing home the moment I left. And I still do. I still miss home. But for the first two years it was like constant crying. LineOut helped me a lot.”

Anousha could identify with that duality as someone making a new home far away from where they were born.

“It was exactly like both the good side and bad side, which was nothing is familiar, everything is unknown, but the good side was nothing was familiar. Everything is unknown. I can make it right,” Aousha said. “The only thing that I could carry with me was me.”

Ultimately, the self is the only constant. The place Azizi thought of as home, in a sense, no longer exists. The tide, in the form of the conquering Taliban, has washed it away.

“Home is lovely as long as it’s really home and not a cage, not a prison,” she said. “But in a home [where] you are being killed and you are being tortured, you’re being suppressed and all this, it stops feeling like home… It’s not home anymore.”

Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.

Comments On Deadline Hollywood are monitored. So don't go off topic, don't impersonate anyone, and don't get your facts wrong.

Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() );